Overview

Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from Eastern Europe to the United States while smaller groups moved to other destinations, such as Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. During and after the First World War hundreds of thousands of Jews were permanently displaced across Eastern Europe. Migration restrictions that were imposed after 1914, especially in the United States, prevented most from reaching safe havens, and an unknown but substantial number of Jews perished during the Holocaust-as they had been displaced in Eastern Europe years before they were deported to ghettos and killing sites. Even after the Holocaust, tens of thousands of Jewish survivors were stranded in permanent transit for many years.Between Borders tells and contextualizes the stories of these Jewish migrants and refugees before and after the First World War. It explains how immigration laws in countries such as the United States influenced migration routes around the world. Using memoirs, letters, and accounts by investigative journalists and Jewish aid workers, Tobias Brinkmann sheds light on the experiences of individual migrants, some of whom laid the foundation for migration and refugee studies as a field of scholarship, even coining terms such as ""displaced person,"" and contributing to its legal definition at the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. The stories of these migrants and refugees were used to propose a new future for the United States, reimagining it as a pluralistic society-one comprised of immigrants.

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9780197655658

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Reviews

In this compact yet comprehensive study, Tobias Brinkmann provides a global and holistic survey of Jewish migration from the mid-nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. With provocative analysis and meticulous research, Brinkmann weaves together the motivations and experiences of Jewish migrants, state policies on migration, and Jewish philanthropic efforts on the migrants' behalf. An essential addition to modern Jewish historiography. * Derek Penslar, Harvard University * Tobias Brinkmann challenges the trope of the 'wandering Jew,' while also revealing how Jewish writers contributed to its creation. Ultimately, he posits World War I as a watershed moment when states sought to stabilize an 'artificial and shifting divide between the flight from persecution and the quest for a better life.' * Donna R. Gabaccia, Professor Emerita of History, University of Toronto * Surprisingly few scholars have tackled the question of migration as a process: not simply a departure and an arrival, but a complex series of movements, arrangements, interventions, intermittent halts, and individual experiences in transit. However, in Between Borders, Tobias Brinkmann comprehensively mines and explains the process and the experience of mass migration, seen and documented both by individuals and at the macro level, as seen by official agencies or the retrospective research of scholars. Brinkmann corrects misapprehensions or inaccuracies and offers an important series of new and original insights and noteworthy innovations in the field of modern Jewish migration out of Eastern Europe. * Eli Lederhendler, Professor emeritus, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem *

Author Information

Tobias Brinkmann is Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago.

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